Last Updated: 12/2019

Use Cases for AI in Marketing

With a course or two under your belt, you’re now ready to find some AI use cases for your business or work.

From audience targeting, to content strategy, to SEO, media buying, email writing, and predicting conversions and churn, hundreds of activities marketers perform every day will be intelligently automated to some degree in the near future.

Billions of dollars are pouring into marketing technology companies intent on driving efficiencies in traditionally time-intensive, data-driven tasks across every marketing discipline.

While in most instances AI will augment, not replace, marketers, it will, nonetheless, have a disruptive effect on the industry. Career paths will be altered, and roles and responsibilities will evolve as businesses seek ways to drive costs down and performance up through AI-powered solutions.

The more you know, and the more proactive you are preparing for the change, the better positioned you’ll be to use AI to your advantage.

How Marketers Rate Marketing AI Use Cases

Using our AI Score for Marketers assessment tool, we’ve asked hundreds of professionals to rate the value of intelligently automating more than 60 common AI use cases within the 5Ps of AI framework:

• Planning: Build intelligent strategies.
• Production: Create intelligent content.
• Personalization: Power intelligent consumer experiences.
• Promotion: Manage intelligent cross-channel and cross-device promotions.
• Performance: Turn data into intelligence.

All use cases are scored on a 1 - 5 scale based on the same question: “Assuming AI technology could be applied, how valuable would it be for your team to intelligently automate each use case?”

Respondents are guided to consider the potential time and money saved, and the increased probability of achieving business goals. 

• 1 = No value
• 2 = Minimal value
• 3 = Moderate value
• 4 = High value
• 5 = Transformative

Here are the top 25 marketing AI use cases, with average rating, according to our analysis of 210 respondents. As you can see, the highest rated use cases were scored between 3 and 4, indicating they are of moderate-to-high value for marketers. 

• (3.88) Analyze existing online content for gaps and opportunities.
• (3.72) Choose keywords and topic clusters for content optimization.
• (3.71) Construct buyer personas based on needs, goals, intent and behavior.
• (3.70) Create data-driven content.
• (3.64) Discover insights into top-performing content and campaigns.
• (3.64) Measure return on investment (ROI) by channel, campaign and overall.
• (3.64) Adapt audience targeting based on behavior and lookalike analysis.
• (3.55) Optimize website content for search engines.
• (3.52) Recommend highly targeted content to users in real-time.
• (3.47) Assess and evolve creative (e.g. landing pages, email, CTAs) with A/B testing.
• (3.44) Deliver individualized content experiences across channels.
• (3.43) Define topics and titles for content marketing editorial calendars.
• (3.41) Predict content performance before deployment.
• (3.40) Forecast campaign results based on predictive analysis.
• (3.37) Build media and influencer databases based on interests, audiences and intent.
• (3.30) Prescribe strategies and tactics to achieve goals.
• (3.27) Present individualized experiences on the web and/or in-app.
• (3.26) Design websites, landing pages and calls-to-action.
• (3.26) Map buyer journey stages based on historical lead and conversion data.
• (3.24) Draft social media updates with copy, hashtags, links and images.
• (3.24) Analyze and edit content for grammar, sentiment, tone and style.
• (3.23) Determine goals based on historical data and forecasted performance.
• (3.23) Score leads based on conversion probabilities.
• (3.23) Curate content from multiple sources.
• (3.22) Build dynamic charts and graphs to visualize performance data. 

Check out AI Score for Marketers below to explore and rate dozens of AI use cases, and get personalized recommendations for AI-powered vendors. The assessment takes 7 - 10 minutes. Contact information isn’t required to get your results.

Go Deeper on Specific Marketing AI Use Cases

We regularly publish deep dives on specific AI use cases within the marketing industry. These articles will help you better understand what’s possible with AI in different areas of marketing across your organization. We’ll update this section often.

• Advertising
• Analytics
• Content Marketing
• Conversational Marketing
• Email
• Sales
• SEO
• Social Media